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Excerpt: ...and a hearty laugh. He was witty in conversation. The Queen, whom I never saw laugh, nor even smile, talked cleverly too, but she picked her words too obviously. Her daughter, the young Princess Sophia, now Grand- Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, was clever too. I was watching her dance at a ball one night, wearing a pretty gown, the chief adornment of which was an eastern scarf, when her father, to whom I was talking, said, Marmotte (her pet name in the family) looks like a Bayadere to-day. And indeed she had all the grace and charm of one. My stay at the Hague was one succession of gatherings, dinners, balls, at which the cordiality of my reception never failed for one minute. It touched me much, and I have kept a grateful memory of it, for there was some merit, on the King's part, in its being so. Had we not largely contributed by our support of the Belgian revolution to lessening his kingdom by one half? And there had been yet another wound to his vanity. In his youth King William, then Prince of Orange, full of eager bravery, had gone to serve in Spain under the Duke of Wellington. He had been wounded in the ranks of the British army at Waterloo, and on the strength of these antecedents he had offered himself in 1815 as a candidate for the hand of Princess Charlotte, heir-presumptive to the Crown of England. He had been ousted. And by whom? By Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whom we had just made King of the Belgians. In spite of these causes for coldness, at all events, the welcome I was given by the King, his family, and by every class of that honest and well-behaved Dutch race, was marked by a constantly increasing kindliness, which filled Bois-le-Comte and his very witty secretary, La Rosiere, with delight. Just at the moment of parting, the King made me a present of an admirable copy in reduced size of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, which hung in his study, saying, You are going to Newfoundland; you shall bring me back a dog in exchange, which...

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